ispconfig3: recommendations?

Hi there. We are small ISP with some servers running ispman, an old-oudated isp management. We are planning to add new servers in the next month to our pool and we are considering ispconfig3. We currently have 1 test server with version 3.0.0.9 and, aside from some minor problems, we are quite happy with it. Now, I need to ask some questions related to performance, with hopes someone can give us good answers

Our new servers will be the Sun Fire X2100 servers with Opteron 1210 Dual Core CPUs and 2GBs of RAM, and we will be using Ubuntu 8.10 (or 9.04 when it comes out). We have a pool of customers with a mix of static and dynamic web sites with php4 and php5 (we keep aprox 100 sites per server now), and mail servers (with high focus on preventing spam). As of now, we use each server for both web and mail services.

1.- Do you recommend using apache worker with fcgid and suphp or apache prefork with mod-php and suphp (depending on the virtual web site)?

2.- We're having problems with suexec and fcgid under ubuntu 8.10. We're not planning to use suexec because of performance reasons. Is that wise? Is suphp good enough for those same purposes?

3.- As of now, we use cyrus mail, but we want dovecot in the future. We know ispconfig3 is configured for courier, but we've managed to make it work with dovecot in our test server. Are you planning to make ispconfig3 work with dovecot? Should we never consider deploy dovecot at all and stay with courier (we have always heard that dovecot performs better, maybe we're wrong)?

1) We recommend to install ISPConfig exactly as described in the manual. You are then able to use all php options that ISPConfig offers.

2) Suphp does basically the same then suexec, but its better configurable. Only if you want to use fastcgi you should use suexec. but there are no known problems, so suexec with fastcgi should work fine.

3) We might support dovecote in a later release. At the moment, courier is the only supported pop3 and imap daemon and if you configure another daemon that is not supported it always can happen that your setup breaks with the next ispconfig release.

thanks, Till. I think we will use dovecot nevertheless. I understand the risks of doing so, but using dovecot for us is a great plus (we will use one of our testing servers to check ispconfig updates first until you officially support it)

Congrats on a great piece of software with very easy to understand code.